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Archive for the 'Crime and Punishment' Category

Posted by Subotai Bahadur on 23rd April 2017 (All posts by Subotai Bahadur)

Despite appearances, there is no natural law that says history repeats itself. As inventive as we are, there are only a limited number of ways that humans can screw things up. We keep trying to come up with new ways, but until we evolve a new brain with more folds on the surface we will keep repeating ourselves.

No matter what our race, culture, or creed; whenever you get a lot of people together in a restricted space, some sort of political order and structure arises. Anarchy as a human ideal is about as fact based as the Land of Oz. And even Oz had a Wizard, sundry Witches, Munchkin Mayors, and probably Alpha and Beta Flying Monkeys.

People have different temperaments; some are more active, some more passive, some are dominant, some less dominant. Then there is the matter of talents, and lacks thereof. People end up being sorted out in various power relationships inside and outside of their family groupings.

It does not matter what the basis of the structure is, be it feudal, democratic, aristocratic, results oriented merit-based, or who has the biggest club and is more willing to use it on everybody else. They share two things. First, whatever the rules of the game, the social contract if you will, with the exception of a criminal fringe pretty much everybody in the society accepts and supports the rules actively or tacitly. Second, if a sufficient percentage refuses to accept those rules, the whole thing falls apart until a new order arises. The new order may or may not be better than the old, but it will be different than the old.

Our country and fairly unique society came into existence through that process. This is in part because we diverged demographically from the parent society. Our population was made up of exiles [including self-exiles], ne’er do wells, criminals, religious fringe elements from the British point of view, and a sufficiency of foreign elements to render the population no longer homogeneous with the old country. Couple that with the detail that in Britain there was much higher percentage of the population that had a vested interest in the existing system, and that a relatively small percentage of the minor nobility and none of the higher nobility and royal family bothered to cross the pond.

What we ended up with is a majority of the population who had no memory of serfdom, were not slaves [Leftist fantasies notwithstanding, slaves were always a minority of the population], and who were used to both being politically and economically free compared to the old country. And the aristocracy here really did not have the pull to make generations of sycophancy attractive and profitable as a lifestyle.

A word should be said on behalf of Berkeley students. I am convinced that the violent rioters were not students from the campus, but were organized outside agitators from off campus that exploited the event. Most students today, even my left-leaning students (I have quite a few in class), were angry about what had happened, as they resented having their protest hijacked by thugs, and the victory it delivered Milo, who is the Kim Kardashian of political theater. Instead of speaking to 500 people in an auditorium last night, he spoke to perhaps 4 million on TV. I think the net present value of the protest to him, in increased book sales and media market value, is at least $1 million—probably considerably more.

That may be comforting to think the riots are driving people to Trump and the political right. But what about the rioters and those supporting them?

Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

Will this work ? Maybe we need better intelligence about who these people are.

We are a week from the Trump inauguration and there are all sorts of threats by the left to disrupt the inauguration.

What can individuals do ?

Tomorrow, my wife and daughter are going to drive to Tucson where we have bought a new home. They plan to leave early and about 10 AM will be passing the Tonopah turnoff on the way to Phoenix. Yesterday, there was quite a bit of excitement there.

According to Col. Frank Milstead, the director of DPS, the trooper was responding to the shots fired call when he came upon a single-vehicle rollover wreck near Tonopah. A woman had been ejected from that vehicle.

The trooper immediately stopped and began laying out flares.

DPS Capt. Damon Cecil said the trooper — a 27-year-veteran of the agency — was ambushed by the suspect when he got out of his vehicle at the scene of the rollover. The trooper was shot and wounded.

I have not yet heard if the suspect was crazy or what motive he might have had. A passerby stopped and told the suspect to stop his assault on the trooper. The passerby then went back to his car and got his gun. He told the suspect to stop or he would shoot him. He did not stop and the passerby shot and killed him.

Milstead, speaking from the hospital to which his trooper and taken, said an “uninvolved third party” who was driving by saw the trooper grappling with the suspect and stopped to help, eventually shooting and killing the suspect.

That civilian, using the wounded trooper’s radio, was the one who alerted DPS to the shooting.

“To the civilian on the DPS trooper’s radio, if you can hear me, I need you to let me know where the suspect is that got in an altercation with our trooper,” the dispatcher could be heard saying on the scanner.

“The suspect is … occasionally breathing or stirring. He’s been shot by a passerby,” the man with the wounded trooper’s radio calmly responded. “He’s laying right next to the officer.”

Arizona has been an open carry state since it was a state. The chief of the Department of Public Safety said his trooper would not be alive but for the passerby with the gun.

I am leaving a state that has become horribly corrupt since I first came here in 1956. I have much higher hopes for Tucson where we will be living after Monday.

I am taking all my guns. California is Chicago with good weather. My niece who is a nurse at Rush medical center has a friend, another nurse with metastatic breast cancer but still working. Yesterday, leaving work, she was held up. She told the gunman, “Go ahead and shoot me, I have nothing to lose.” He robbed her but did not shoot her.

I didn’t watch very much of the horrific YouTube tape of four inner-city “youths” of color tormenting a special needs white kid – a tape that was all over the alternative media last week, and miracle of miracles, even made it to the national media, where incidents of black-on-white violence usually get to be covered, like with a pillow until they stop moving. It goes without saying that if the skin colors of victim and perpetrators had been reversed, just about every other national news story would have been driven off the front page and out of the first twenty minutes of national news for weeks. (Save perhaps one of the Kardashians bursting out of her dress like an overstuffed sausage in the middle of a top-drawer celebrity event.) I know that, you know that, we all are most tiresomely and cynically aware of that. Many would have been the chins tugged, NPR would have been consulting their golden rolodex for the most plummy-voiced commentator with an air of spurious authority over matters racial, CNN anchors and the correspondents of main-line news broadcasters over the world would have been hyperventilating in their efforts to keep up with the currently-fashionable expressions of condemnation of American racism, brutality, racism, cruelty to the ‘other’, white privilege, racism, the center-city of places like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit (aside – is there anything left in Detroit to burn?) would have been going up in flames … so on and so forth, und so weiter. Read the rest of this entry »

A. Are there restrictions on the voter registration drive offering something of value to a person in
exchange for completing a voter registration application?

It is a felony under New York law to pay, lend or contribute, or offer or promise to pay, lend or contribute any money or other valuable consideration to or for any voter, or to or for any other person, to induce such voter or other person to place or cause to be placed or refrain from placing or causing to be placed
his name upon a registration poll record.14

Federal law states that whoever pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years. 15 At least one federal appellate court has interpreted payment as intended to include forms of pecuniary value offered or given directly to an individual voter, and indicated the value should be based on an assessment of the monetary worth of an item from the perspective of the voter receiving the item. That case held that food vouchers could be payment.16

There have been any number of important stories covered by the nationally-based establishment media in the last decade or so – in the deathless phrase tweeted by Iowahawk, David Burge, “with a pillow, until they stop moving.” Through the internet and alternate media, a good many of those stories that would have stopped moving through judicious use of the media pillow in previous decades – have still managed to percolate from those alternate media sites into the national mass media conversation. Things like the Dan Rather/TANG faked memo, the Swift Boat Veterans going after John Kerry as the duty-shirking Eddie Haskell of the Swift Boat service and dozens of other incidents fought off the smothering pillow, the Chick-Fil-A boycott, and yes – eventually got discovered in the major media outlets. With considerable reluctance, one might add. The matter of black on white violent crime may be on the edge of being discovered by the mainstream media, much as the Hollywood producer in the Godfather movie discovered the head of a dead horse in his bed.Read the rest of this entry »

The broken windows model of policing…focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.

Hillary and the FBI Director Comey have advertised both outrageous cyber-security weakness and more importantly the breakdown of social mores of “the rule of law” in Federal Government cyber-security. If you advertise you are weak, stupid and capricious in enforcing cyber-security, it is blood in the water for cyber-criminals of all sorts.

Consider this not exhaustive list busted e-mail security associated with Hillary Clinton and her Democratic Party surrogates.

This is a very small fraction of the “Broken Window theory” as applied to cyber-crime. What we see related to Hillary. The problem here is that this sort of political corruption cannot be centralized. If Hillary can do it and get away with it. Exactly how many other illicit off-site e-mail accounts filled with Federal secrets are there now? And how many more will there be between now and Jan 2017?

Lois Lerner at IRS and the EPA director are both known to be using non-Federal government secured public e-mail systems as early as 2010.

Exactly how many other officials at the State Department, Defense Department, Interior Department (Can you say Secret Service?), other non-departmental American intelligence bureaucracies, and the Federal Reserves are there?

That is the real cyber-security “broken window” Hillary and FBI Director Comey have opened. And this is the cyber-security nightmare that will be with America for decades, barring a massive and systematic purge of everyone high and low associated with such behavior by a new President or after another — likely nuclear — Pearl Harbor.

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,” “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

Posted by Trent Telenko on 17th July 2016 (All posts by Trent Telenko)

Seven Baton Rouge area law men have been shot and three are dead in an ambush near Police H.Q. in Baton Rouge. There was as single perpetrator in a black outfit, with a hoodie or other face covering, with a long rifle. He was engaged by Police and shot in the exchange. The USA Today won’t say his race.

Report: 3 police officers in Baton Rouge shot dead

Three police officers have been shot dead in Baton Rouge, La., and others may have been wounded, authorities said Sunday.

.

The three officers were shot near the department headquarters, Baton Route Mayor Kip Holden told MSNBC. At least four others were injured in the shooting, he said.

.

“They are investigating,” he said. “Right now we are trying to get our arms around everything.”

.

Two Baton Rouge police officers and one East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy are dead, according to WBRZ-TV’s Michael Vinsanau.

.

The gunman was shot, a Louisiana State Police spokesman said, but his condition was not immediately clear.

and

A witness told WBRZ-TV that a man was dressed in black with his face covered was shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza. Police closed the streets between the police department’s headquarters and Interstate 12.

.

Vinsanau of WBRZ tweeted that more than a dozen marked and unmarked police cars have sped to the scene, and that a SWAT team is on location. State police armed with rifles are posted blocks away, Vinsanau tweeted.

That is one of those military acronyms which everyone who has ever been in the military for longer than – oh, I don’t know – a couple of years? A single hitch in one of the armed services? Whatever; what it means in plain English is “operations security” – and what that entails in the larger sense – drilled in by basic training, refresher training, briefings, a constant dribble of AFRTS spots cautioning the same in 30 second bites, and occasionally by the direct intervention of a supervisor administering a stern reminder – is that you keep your mouth shut about stuff and treat classified material with every care. Even stuff that seems minor, inconsequential, trivial, and is not in point of fact, actually classified. Because a whole lot of little pieces put together by an expert analyst could reveal a pretty big picture; a big and possibly life-threatening picture to someone, or hundreds, even thousands of someones.Read the rest of this entry »

Dallas just suffered the largest law enforcement mass murder since 9/11/2001. To date, there have been 14 people reported as shot, 12 law enforcement and two civilians. Five of the law enforcement offices who were shot have died. One Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer and four Dallas Police Department officers were murdered.

The murders occurred during a 7pm to 9pm Black Lives Matter associated protest (the association is disputed) in down town Dallas.

The chilling execution of a law enforcement officer was caught on digital video and broadcast by the Dallas Fox News affiliate whose vantage point is on the map below.

Google map of shooting area in downtown Dallas.

As I worked a few blocks away from the shooting scene until last week, this hits close to home.

The usual caveats about you cannot trust any reports — other than the casualty count — in the first 24 hours apply. These seem to be the best reports to date:

FBI Director James Comey today in a Washington DC news conference confirmed what many have suspected.

The Rule of Law in America is now strictly a political football for those who are in power.

The FBI has refused to indict ex-Sec of State Hillary Clinton for multiple clear violations of Federal law by hosting an unsecured e-mail server with classified data off-site from the State Department. A server that was know to have been hacked by most of America’s foreign enemies.

I know everybody’s trying to spin this thing to support their favorite political hobbyhorse, be it gun control or anti-immigration, but it you take a deep breath and step back and look and the evidence in the cold light of day without political spin, this guy seems to fall into the profile of the typical mass shooter:

He was a person with psychological problems. Clearly he was socially awkward, not well-acculturated, had gay desires that he couldn’t reconcile with his religious upbringing and lashed out in an attempt to resolve his personal demons and maybe give his sorry life some meaning.

He had an ideology, but I think that ideology should be seen as a seed. If it didn’t fall on the fertile ground of a guy with profound psychological issues, it probably wouldn’t have sprouted.

At the end of the day, though, that’s all psychobabble. What matters is how do we protect ourselves from guys like this without destroying our freedoms. Don’t expect to find an easy answer to that one, but here are a few suggestions:

1. Stop all the nonsense about “assault weapons” and gun control. We’ve had that debate for 50 years and the American people have consistently rejected draconian gun control. Ain’t gonna happen. People aren’t going to disarm themselves when the government is incapable of protecting them.

2. My question for Hillary Clinton (which I am sure she won’t want to answer) is “Is it ok to fire an armed security guard who publicly espouses support for jihad even if he hasn’t broken any laws?” If we don’t have the same answer to that question as we would if we substituted Ku Klux Klan for jihad, we aren’t in the right place. And if the answer to both questions isn’t yes, what exactly is the point of licensing security guards?

3. We need to do a better job of acculturating foreigners and getting them to become Americans. We used to be really good at that back when we believed in America as an idea, but we’ve gotten so mired in multiculturalism that we’re afraid to insist that people embrace American values, even people to whom we grant birthright citizenship. That’s a problem. Of course, that will require us to come to some agreement on what “American values” are. And if you think the answer to that question is just going to be White Evangelical Protestant Values, you need to take a look around you and count heads. If we can’t come up with a definition of “American values” that has a place for gay people and people whose parents don’t speak English and atheists and Muslims who don’t support violent jihad, then we’re screwed. We will just balkanize ourselves into armed camps and become Lebanon.

4. We need to stop the war on men. It’s creating a lot of disaffected, alienated young men with no real purpose to their lives who become fertile ground for radical ideologies. Omar Mateen and Dylan Root are both fruit of the same tree.

I’m not sure any of this would have prevented this particular incident. But I am sure that we’re going to have more of this stuff if we don’t get the above items right.

I think it’s huge. It goes to the heart, it disputes the heart, of Mrs Clinton’s defense.

…

She knowingly and willfully violated her own State Department requirements that she put in place for all other employees…

…

She diverted 100% – one hundred percent! – of all digital traffic coming to her through her home server… She was also harshly criticized for keeping some of the email traffic from the State Department, which to this day she believes she wiped clean – I happen to believe the FBI found what she believes she wiped clean…

…

As we speak, our colleague Katherine Herridge is in a federal courtroom in Alexandria Virginia listening to this Romanian hacker tell a federal judge about the deal his lawyers cut with the Justice Department. The quid pro quo is: ‘Don’t send me to jail for a long time and I’ll tell you – I’ll tell a jury! – how easy it was for hackers in Europe to get in to Mrs Clinton’s emails.

Why was the report released now? Has the DNC decided Hillary cannot beat Trump and decided to throw her under the bus? If so, who’s up to replace her? Biden-Warren? Sanders? And will Debbie Wasserman-Schultz get the boot too?

Ah, the stupidities come so thick and fast of late. It’s like the rain here in Texas, which has been pouring down with such intensity over the last few days that all the usual low-water flood-danger locations have been – as any fool could easily predict – flooded and closed to vehicle traffic. It rained so hard on Thursday morning that for the first time in ages, we skipped walking the dogs. Looked out at the flooded street, the flooded front walkway, rain coming down sideways, and the sky so dark that it looked like twilight already; nope – not even the dogs were keen, especially Nemo the Terrier-God-Knows-What, who loathes and despises water with a wholly undoglike passion.

But social and political stupidities – what a rich buffet was laid before us this week, even apart from the gross stupidity of deciding that the ostensible civil rights and good-will of what may be .03% of the general population – that miniscule transgender portion of it – supersedes the rights of women and girls in a public restroom/locker/changing room to be certain they are not being letched on by a perv who has twigged to the fact that if he only declares that he feels female on that particular day that no one will want to firmly escort his perverted ass out of said safe space. Yes, the Kennedy Administration vowed to put a man on the moon, the Obama Administration has put a man in the Ladies’ Room and damned if the pervy wretch isn’t insisting that he has a perfect right to be there. Progress, y’all. While the perv element may have witless friends in the form of various celebrities ostentatiously declaring that they won’t be performing in *insert the location here* because hate/failure-to-socially-advance/toleration-eleventy!! I am brought to wonder if their concerts were significantly less than sold-out, and this is a handy means of cancelling an event and putting a convenient cover over the economic failure of it all. And I am also reminded of the way that mobs came out to eat at Chick-fil-A, in response to an announced boycott because the gaystapo getting all (you should pardon the expression) butt-hurt over the Chick-Fil-A CEO mildly expressing personal support for traditional marriage.Read the rest of this entry »

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why the burning social question of the moment has to do with transgender persons and bathrooms, locker rooms and changing facilities, both those for the convenience of the public and those dedicated for the use of school children. First and foremost, I will not believe that there can be all that many genuine transgender persons of any age wandering around, outside of a few very limited locations; very few and those who have not taken the plunge entirely would, I believe, not be all that damned flamboyant about it. It is remotely possible that I might have been in a public facility at the same time as an undecided or a totally committed transgender and been unaware of it, but frankly, I believe that my personal chances of having done so and knowing about it are about on par with my chances of being abducted by aliens.Read the rest of this entry »

Curious indeed, to reflect that by the end of this year, I will have been out of the Air Force for as long as I was in it – but the time does fly when you are having fun. But twenty years in the Big Blue Machine does leave marks, as well as an exquisite sense of how the military really operates in real time, among the lower-ranking levels, close to the ground. This isn’t a sense readily developed from reading, although I suppose someone with wide experience, a strong sense of empathy and close personal associations with veterans can develop it by proxy.

This around-about way of explaining how all this last week, my daughter and I were wondering about a murder-suicide at Lackland AFB last Friday morning – nearly a week ago. A trainee airman had fatally shot his squadron commander, and then killed himself. Of course, it all came out in dribbles over the weekend; the trainee was an E-6, aged 41 and a student in the pararescue course … and had also resigned from the FBI as a special agent. Everything about this was curious, even unlikely; the Air Force para-rescue specialty is one of the most physically-demanding jobs the Air Force has. It’s comparable to the SEALS, and Army Special Forces, in that many are called, few chosen, and even fewer still graduate.Read the rest of this entry »

(A diversion for a Friday, from the next Luna City Chronicle, which will be launched late this month … since everyone seemed to find the first Chronicle amusing, and to be wondering about the cliffhanger ending …)

There are three official historical markers in Town Square, much cherished by local citizens. The most noted is the one marking the site where Old Charley Mills was nearly lynched by infuriated citizens, which action was forestalled by the timely intervention of somewhat less-infuriated and more clear-thinking individuals, who included Doc Wyler’s father, Albert Wyler and his younger brother Thomas Wyler, the Reverend Calvin Rowbottom, then senior minister of the Luna City First Methodist Church, and a handful of others whose irreproachable respectability was of such a degree that they were able with reason and persuasion, to turn their fellow citizens aside from such an irrevocable action. The second official historical marker is set into the wall of the building now housing Luna Café and Coffee and marks the site of the last officially noted personal gunfight on the streets of Luna City in 1919; this being a duel between Don Antonio Gonzales and Eusebio Garcia Maldonado. The only casualties were the radiator of Don Antonio’s Model-A sedan, a city street-light and a mule hitched to a wagon parked farther down the square felled by a wild shot from Eusebio’s revolver.

The third historical marker is set into the red brick and neo-classical style exterior wall of the what was once the Luna City Savings & Loan, but now houses city offices and the Chamber of Commerce. Read the rest of this entry »

My family history is a story of Chicago as my mother was born there and her parents met in Aurora, a suburb where my grandfather’s sister ran a boarding house. My grandmother lived there while working as a supervisor in a corset factory after she had moved to Chicago from Canada. My grandfather, Joseph Mileham, was a railroad engineer, the equivalent at the time of an airline pilot. My father’s family were farmers and lived 60 miles from Chicago. He and my mother met in Chicago when they were both working at a music company. They had a typical long Depression courtship which included a trip to California by my mother after she lost her mother and brother the same year, 1926.

My growing up was an almost idyllic childhood, although of course it had its moments.

The house I grew up in is shown here.

That photo was taken a few years ago. I took a more recent one a few years ago and the owner of the house, a black guy about 35, came out to see who I was. He insisted on taking me on a tour. He was quite proud of it. He asked if I could send him photos of the house when we lived there. Here are a few more of them.

An archaic term, in general; according to the wildly variable and sometimes suspect Wikipedia, it is a term taken from an even more archaic term for food for livestock. “Soldiers are the metaphorical food for enemy cannon fire.” Wikipedia defines the expression further as, “…an informal, derogatory term for combatants who are regarded … as expendable in the face of enemy fire … or to distinguish expendable low-grade or inexperienced combatants from supposedly more valuable veterans.”

Expendable is the operative word, and expendable without much regret on the part of the credentialed elite – the political, social or military elite – because the expected goal is considered worth the sacrifice, especially if the sacrifice is borne by others. Reading this week about the sexual violence reported – reluctantly in many cases by German media – as being perpetrated on a grand scale by recent Middle Eastern migrants masquerading as war refugees on women in German cities on this last New Years Eve gave me a sickening new understanding of the concept.Read the rest of this entry »

David Smith Terry was truly a man of his time and place – Texas and California in the early to mid-19th century. He possessed a large portion of the same intelligence, ambition, and physical courage which distinguished many of his contemporaries, as young men in tumultuous times. Alas, such qualities were offset by a pig-headed conviction of his own righteousness, a boiling-hot temper readily provoked to violence, and one more weakness, which would eventually prove fatal to David Smith Terry; he was all too ready to act on impulse without regard for consequence.
He was of a generation born into a relatively new country, with no memory of colonial rule by Britain, or the revolution itself, save perhaps for passed-down recollections of his maternal and paternal grandfathers, who had both fought in it with distinction. David S. Terry was the second of four sons of Clinton Terry and Sarah Smith Terry. The Terry marriage does not appear to have been a particularly successful one; they separated in 1835, when David Terry would have been about eight years old. Sarah Terry must have been a woman of spirit and determination, for she moved with her four sons to Texas in that same year, apparently hoping to retrieve some portion of respectability and income which had been lost through her husband’s mismanagement – mismanagement which must have been on a fairly epic scale to leave her in possession of their remaining property and custody of their sons. She and her sons established a plantation west of the present-day city of Houston, where they planted cotton and waited for prosperity to bless them once more. Instead, Sarah Terry died, shortly thereafter, leaving her sons – the oldest, Benjamin being fifteen, and David thirteen – essentially orphaned in the war and rebellion which followed.

David, large for his age and already impetuous, enlisted in Sam Houston’s army of Texans at Gonzales, following the fall of the Alamo. Reputedly, he fought at San Jacinto with considerable distinction. When Texas won a shaky independence by Houston’s victory, David S. Terry returned home to the cotton plantation – but not for long. He took up the study of law in the office of a relative by marriage, was admitted to the bar and practiced in Galveston for some years. He was described as a tall, handsome gentleman, solidly built, with steel-grey eyes under heavy brows, and sandy hair brushed back from a high forehead. He sported chin-whiskers but no mustache. Naturally rather reserved, he could be animated in conversation when the topic interested him, and very good company. He identified passionately as a man of Southern sympathies and as a Texan; to that end, he usually carried a sheathed hunting knife of the design made popular by Jim Bowie.Read the rest of this entry »

Add me to a relatively short list of people on social media who are not making any particular gesture of sympathy and solidarity with the people of France who have been whammed for the second time in a year by the bloody-minded foot-soldiers of Islam. It’s not that I don’t care, and that I don’t feel the least shred of human sympathy for those people who went out for a drink and a good meal at a popular restaurant, a raucous rock concert, a soccer game, and then had their lives changed forever – if not ended entirely. It’s just that at this particular point in time, I am a bit tired of making easy feel-good, symbolic gestures about Islamic terrorism. Once you’ve made them … then, what for a follow-up?Read the rest of this entry »

Haldane’s critique was directed at the series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series, That Hideous Strength . Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many of years. All this may sound ancient and esoteric, but I believe the Lewis/Haldane controversy is very relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape.

To briefly summarize That Hideous Strength: Mark, a young sociologist, is hired by a government agency called NICE–the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation–having as its stated mission the application of science to social problems. (Unbelievably, today the real-life British agency which establishes rationing policies for healthcare is also called NICE.) In the novel, NICE turns out to be a conspiracy devoted to very diabolical purposes, as Mark gradually discovers. It also turns out that the main reason NICE wanted to hire Mark is to get control of his wife, Jane (maiden name: Tudor) who has clairvoyant powers. The NICE officials want to use Jane’s abilities to get in touch with the magician Merlin and to effect a junction between modern scientific power and the ancient powers of magic, thereby bringing about the enslavement of mankind and worse. Jane, though, becomes involved with a group which represents the polar opposite of NICE, led by a philology professor named Ransom, who is clearly intended as a Christ-figure. The conflict between NICE and the Ransom group will determine the future of humanity.

A brilliantly written and thought-provoking book, which I highly recommend, even if, like me, you’re not generally a fan of fantasy novels.

With context established, here are some of the highlights of the Lewis/Haldane controversy:

1) Money and Power.

In his article, Haldane attacks Lewis for the latter’s refusal to absolutely condemn usury, and celebrates the fact that “Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface”…clearly referring to the Soviet Union. Here’s part of Lewis’s response:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend onmoney. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in isthat of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance ofthe strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, andthe unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that mostmembers of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, towin the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice toobad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not inthe least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs tocare about money if most of the things he wants will be offered bycringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force? Thislesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasonswhy I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishmentof Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I havealready lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: itwas the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. IfMammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. Butwhere Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes hisplace? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order tokeep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But allmen also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘inthe know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passioninsufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When thestate of society is such that money is the passport to all theseprizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. Butwhen the passport changes, the desires will remain.